Community Service

Life in Brooklyn

As soon as my husband and I moved across the street from the Iglesia Pentecostal, I knew I wanted to help the little Latin church. There was just so much about it to like. A church is part of what makes a place a community, and that’s important. Plus, this church occupied the oldest storefront in our corner of Williamsburg, and the aging churchgoers in their faded down jackets sipping coffee and speaking Spanish felt really authentic. That meant a lot after the bad experiences I’d had with fake upscale stuff. I won’t get too into it, but not far from our previous apartment was a holistic veterinary clinic. They called themselves “alternative,” but ask them if they could save a sack of oysters you bought from a raw bar and they sounded an awful lot like the vets at “regular” clinics. At any rate, I didn’t know exactly how I’d make my presence known to the churchgoers. But I was certain that somehow I would make an impact on their simple, poetic, passionate lives of quiet, soulful endurance.

In preparation, I decided to read the great works of modern Latin-American literature. I only got through two, because magic realism gave me a recurring nightmare that I was being strangled by a rainbow, but what mattered was that I made the effort. I always made the effort when it came to that church. Once, a woman at the farmer’s market pressured me into buying persimmons. I left them by the church door, and the next day they were gone, so I assume some parishioner made jelly. I also gave the church’s address to a really good bilingual d.j. I met at a tapas bar. And I never got mad even though every single Sunday morning we had to put up with hymns and an electric guitar. Sure, the church woke me up, but someday it might wake me up from a nightmare of being strangled by a rainbow. It’s all in how you look at things.

Then the church woke us up on a Saturday. And it wasn’t hymns. It was an endless series of metallic clanks.

My husband, Danny, groaned and pulled a pillow over his head. He had tossed and turned for most of the night, and it was my fault. Right before we went to bed, I asked whether you can compost palm fronds, which, it turns out, is a complicated question even when it’s hypothetical.

When I peeked out the window, I saw an old man inside the church gate holding a hammer. Someone had chained a bicycle to the other side of the gate, and he was trying to break the lock. This was my moment. In the months since we’d arrived, no one from the church had ever spoken to me. No one had even thanked me for the jelly. Making my way downstairs, I decided that I would introduce myself, get the man to stop banging, and recite a poem by Pablo Neruda.

“Hi. I’m Gina. Could you please stop doing that?”

He shook the bike frame. “This is locked here how long?”

Seeing him up close, you could tell that he knew everything about beauty, pain, and loss. What was time to a man like that? Maybe the bike had been locked less than a second ago. Or maybe it had been here for a thousand years.

I did my best. “For as long as . . . love?”

“Three days!” he said. “I get sued. If someone walks and trips over, I get sued.” He slammed his open hand onto a white piece of paper taped to the gate. “I have a sign,” he said. In ballpoint pen, it read, “Bikes Not Allow on Gates.” He raised the hammer again. Clank! “This neighborhood is no good,” he said.

“If you could just wait a couple of hours . . .”

“No!”

“People are sleeping.”

“You go to bed early next time.”

And then I said it. “My husband is sick.”

Everything stopped. “Your husband is sick?”

“Yes.”

“I will pray for him.” He dropped the hammer into a bag and gave me a gentle smile.

“That’s not necessary.”

He bowed. “I will pray for his sickness to end.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought the polite thing was to offer an enchanting story about an injured parrot who’s given new tin wings by the daughter of a general, but I didn’t know any. So I considered my budding friendship with the old man and how I couldn’t let its foundation be built on a lie. Then I turned around and went home.

Back in bed, my husband threw a sleepy arm around me and said, “Great job, hon.”

“Thanks, sweetie.”

For the next few weeks, whenever I walked past the church, I pretended that my husband was sick. It wasn’t hard. I tended to look sad at the time, because I was breaking in a new pair of ankle boots.

Whenever I saw the old man, I would say, “I’m the one whose husband is sick.”

Then he would say, “He is in our prayers.”

That was it. And I loved it. Sometimes the man’s eyes would wander to the abandoned bike, which still leaned against the gate. At other times, he’d walk back into the church and close the door. Either way, I was pretty sure he had taught me an essential lesson about the human condition. The way he moved. The way he sighed. The way he gripped the hammer and waved it when I jumped in a cab and yelled from the window that my husband was sick as I drove off to brunch. I was learning the meaning of words I’d thought I understood. Family. Blood. Earth. Every day at dusk, I had a strong desire to pick up a handful of soil and let it sift slowly through my fingers while I thought about mortality. Unfortunately, I had a lot of phone meetings, so I couldn’t get to it for a while. But when my schedule finally opened up I went to the park and I did it. I did it over and over again.

I still had dirt on my hands when I got back to our street and saw the old man chatting with my husband. Danny was dressed in his running clothes and had taken out the bolt cutters we keep in the basement. As the two of them talked, he snipped the chain locking the bike to the church gate. They shook hands and laughed about something.

When he saw me, Danny yelled, “Gina!” Then I heard him say, “That’s my wife, Gina.”

I was a liar and the old man knew it. Horrified, I ran. I ran and I didn’t stop until I got to a mid-century-furniture store with a Saarinen womb chair and climbed in. When the owner of the shop asked me to take my feet off the seat, I ducked into the hip bar next door. It was designed to look like a turn-of-the-century New York saloon and I ordered every cocktail on the menu that contained something “muddled.” A pub quiz was going on in the back room. I yelled out the answer to a question about Wu-Tang Clan, then stumbled into a nearby boutique and bought a ring made from an old typewriter key. I was humiliated. I was bingeing. I bought an LP of music I already owned on my computer and had previously owned on audiotape. I drank coffee you stir with a special bamboo paddle that’s sold separately. Then I hit another bar designed to look like turn-of-the-century New York and ordered every cocktail on the menu that contained something “clarified.”

It was almost dawn when I got home. I knew Danny was out looking for me. Before I went upstairs, I did something terrible. I pulled my bike out and I locked it to the church gate.

A couple of hours later, the clanks started. I finally got some sleep. ♦